Which is the hero?

David Edgar

There is little about the charming Hotel Tramontano in Sorrento to indicate quite what inspired Henrik Ibsen to write a play about congenital syphilis while staying there, and not much more (I am assured) in the equally delightful Hotel Luna at Amalfi to evoke the dark midwinter drama of A Doll’s House. The incongruity between the stark Scandinavian gloom of the major plays and the Mediterranean lushness of the places where Ibsen wrote them is a warning against reading the art too readily from the life, and one that Robert Ferguson has not heeded. For him, the life is the only way to support his thesis, which is that the great plays aren’t great at all, and that after Ibsen’s first success, Peer Gynt (written at Casamicciola, Ischia, in 1867), it all went horribly wrong.

Ferguson, himself a playwright, and a translator of Ibsen, was inspired to write the first major biography for 25 years by seeing John Barton’s Oslo production of Peer Gynt ‘and wondering why a man who could create a comic circus like that should choose to devote the rest of his life to writing a series of dark analyses of unhappiness’. The explanation he comes up with is that between Brand, written just before Peer, and the social dramas written after it, Ibsen set out to construct himself, or rather reconstruct himself, as the black-hatted, grim-lipped and impenetrable Henrik Ibsen ‘of a thousand dour cabinet portraits’ – a reinvention of which the plays were an integral part.

The first half of this thesis is persuasive. Like Dickens’s, Ibsen’s parents were petit-bourgeois fallen on hard times; Ibsen’s equivalent of Dickens’s sojourn in the blacking factory was a period in an apothecary’s laboratory at Grimstad. Thrown together with the maids in this cramped establishment, Ibsen fathered an illegitimate child, whose upkeep was partially responsible for the debt which dogged him through the first half of his life and drove him into exile in his late thirties. It was after the success of his epic verse-drama Brand (written at the age of 37) that he consciously undertook that ‘radical process of self-reinvention to create an outward image that would become – through the Victorian fashion for portrait photography – the agent of his spreading fame’. And it was this Ibsen – he of the shaved lip and mutton-chop whiskers, the wardrobe of a London businessman and the demeanour of a patriarch – who wrote bombastically aggrieved letters of complaint to publishers, collaborators and associates, and who harvested awards and honours with the single-minded zeal of a small boy spotting trains.

This Ibsen was also a man of strangely mutating views. For Ferguson, ‘the popular definition of Ibsen as a liberal humanist is misleading in its simplicity and obscures several paradoxes.’ They include Ibsen’s increasingly dismissive attitude to the feminist movement he was deemed to have promoted in A Doll’s House, excoriating ‘feminist fanatics’ and declaring to the Norwegian Women’s Union that he was interested not in the woman problem but rather woman’s role as wife and mother. Though Ghosts was famously reviled as obscene, Ibsen remained silent as two young writers were jailed for writing ‘immoral literature’ in defence of sexual equality. He was the romantic nationalist who hoped that Italian unification would not bring about ‘too many changes to the usual way of things’, the erstwhile champion of working-class emancipation who opposed the introduction of democracy in his own country and the advocate of directness and honesty in family relations who took four months to reply to his sister’s letter reporting their mother’s death.

All of this is excellently and elegantly argued, copiously backed up by documentary material, old and new. Ferguson has, for example, found the letter in which the playwright admitted paternity of his son: ‘I cannot with any certainty deny the charge that I am the father,’ the young Ibsen writes, ‘since I have unfortunately had intercourse with her, encouraged as I was by her flirtatious ways.’ (Her response, reported somewhat later in life, was: ‘Well, you know, that Henrik, it wasn’t easy to stop him.’) He also reveals how close Ibsen came to being sentenced to hard labour for failing to keep up with his support payments, and the general humiliations attendant on his early poverty, which explain his eagerness for respectability when his fortunes changed.

The problem is not with the point that this was the person who wrote Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House and Ghosts, but with the idea that these plays were part of the same project of self-promotion. For Ferguson, the mythological Brand and Peer Gynt were timeless creations, but ‘it takes a certain kind of daring ... to erect monuments to ourselves and our ways while we are still alive.’ For ‘daring’ read ‘arrogance’: Ibsen’s sense of his own destiny demanded that he set about documenting his age and it was indeed the Ibsen of the photographs, the decorations and the monumental scowl who convinced himself that he should express ‘an absolute and attainable truth’ which had ‘been revealed to him alone’.

Letters

While I cannot deny that I admire Ibsen’s early masterpieces Brand and Peer Gynt more than the later prose plays, I believe a misquotation in David Edgar’s review of my biography (LRB, 20 March) creates a wrong impression of why I do so. In the Foreword I describe Peer Gynt as a ‘cosmic circus’, not a ‘comic circus’. I used the word to convey the idea that in Peer Gynt Ibsen was trying to write a play about ‘everything’, whereas in The Pillars of Society and A Doll’s House the aims are much more circumscribed.

Challenging my description of When We Dead Awaken as Ibsen’s moving last attempt to understand himself as a man and an artist, and presumably thinking of the reference to a ‘comic circus’, David Edgar writes that there is no evidence that Ibsen had greater respect for his early ‘funny plays’ than for the later, more famous plays with modern settings. But the plays that I suggest Ibsen was thinking of when he has Rubek talk about the dramatic changes that took place in his sculpture – the popularisation and vulgarisation of his work – are The Pretenders, Love’s Comedy, Brand, Peer Gynt and Emperor and Galilean, the plays of the 1860s and early 1870s that pre-date The Pillars of Society. With the exception of Love’s Comedy, none of these can be described as ‘funny’ plays.

One of the chief points of distinction between these and the well-known later plays is the presence of a range of complex and fascinating male characters – Falk, Skule, Brand and Peer Gynt, Julian the Apostate – while female characters play only minor roles. The situation in the plays from The Pillars of Society in 1877 to Hedda Gabler in 1890 is, generally speaking, the reverse, and it seems to me that Ibsen’s deepening interest in the psychology of his female characters led him to create alongside them male characters who cannot compare in complexity and interest with the earlier creations. The situation persists until Ibsen’s interest again returns to a study of male psychology in The Master Builder and in John Gabriel Borkmann. Our Ibsen critics persist, with Shaw, in wanting to find in him a dedicated social reformer and a consistently liberal thinker, and edit away what does not fit in with this picture.

David Edgar thinks my way of describing Nora’s behaviour in deserting her family at the end of the play displays a ‘glum, accusatory morality’. I would submit that the glum, accusatory morality is Nora’s. Thorvald is, by the end of A Doll’s House, utterly humbled. His attitudes have changed as dramatically as have Nora’s, and it is inconceivable that the relationship between them could ever return to its former dishonesty. So why does she leave? Because Thorvald must be punished. The absence of a sense of forgiveness is typical of Ibsen. That her leaving might be a dramatic necessity is another argument altogether.